 | Writing Was Everything Subjects: Kazin. Alfred. 1915-1998; American literature -- History and criticism -- Theory etc.; Criticism -- United States -- History -- 20th century; United States -- Intellectual life -- 20th century; Critics -- United States -- Biography; Reflecting with graceful erudition on literature, litterateurs and his own work, noted critic Kazin (On Native Grounds) offers a distilled summa of his engagements with the word. Based on lectures delivered at Harvard, the book opens with a vigorous harrumph directed at postmodern critics. Indeed, Kazin learned from his childhood exposure to Dickens and from his apprenticeship as a book reviewer under Edmund Wilson at the New Republic that books matter, that they link authors-for example, Faulkner, Henry Roth and Richard Wright-to the passions of their time. Assigned in 1945 to report on the social crisis in Britain, Kazin entered a darker world, grappling with Orwell and Kafka, and also with Simone Weil, whose life and writing recalled for him the madness of Moby-Dick. Back in New York after the war, Kazin began walking his city and engaged with Rothko and Bellow, Arendt and Sartre. He ends with an inspirational look at Czeslaw Milosz, whose work not only recalls horrors Americans escaped but also addresses vital questions of faith and evil, setting an example, Kazin writes, in a country that has become ``cruel toward every human weakness... chauvinistic to the point of hysteria.'' (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved Alfred Kazin, a literary critic and professor of English literature, was born in Brooklyn on June 5, 1915. He was educated at City College and Columbia University. Kazin established his own critical reputation in the mid-1940s with On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American literature. His later work, Bright Book of American Life (1973), is both a recapitulation of modernism and an evaluation of American writers who have achieved prominence since 1945. Modernism, a favorite topic of Kazin, is in his view a literary revolution marked by spontaneity and individuality but lacking in precisely the mass culture appeal necessary to its survival. Contemporaries (1962) includes reflective essays on travel, five essays on Freud, and some very perceptive essays on literary and political matters. The final section, "The Critic's Task," concerns itself with the critic's function within a popular and an academic context and with critical theory and principles. Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) describes Kazin's early years with The New Republic as book reviewer and evaluates his contemporaries in a period when the depression and radical political thought, pro and con, deeply affected literary production. In the midst of the current antihumanistic trend in literary theory, Kazin remains a literary critic of the old school, believing in the relevance of literature to modern life. Alfred Kazin died on June 5, 1998. (Bowker Author Biography) |
